Why jMeter show transaction controller data in its summary report?

Question

Here i have A recording controller and test script recorder. I recorded the user activities using template. This automatically creates a Recording controller and then transaction controller. Each transaction controller has child HTTP request wrapped inside it. Now when I run the test after creating a test script, I see that the aggregated result shows information about (throuput, error, min etc) for child HTTP request(Sampler) as well as the parent transaction controller.

I'll make it more clearer with images below.

In the above picture ive created the test plan. Now when I run this test i get following result. The circled ones are the transaction controller.

Here, i have circled the parent transaction controller. Now why on earth is this adding up to the result.

Question: Is it making any request to the website? Why is this showing up and adding values to the child request. This thing is just a sum of all its child request - so, why is it adding up in the table?

Here again if I click on the "Generate parent sample" then it hides the child request and shows only the summed up report which is totally different from above report.

Now the question is how do I turn things around. What are the consequences. And what should I do in this case. Shall i compute the parent-child report or just the parent report data?

Answer 1

As per documentation of Transaction Controller:

The Transaction Controller generates an additional sample which measures the overall time taken to perform the nested test elements.

So if you don't want this additional sampler, just remove it or replace it by Simple Controller.

Note it is useful when it contains more than 1 sampler.

If you're looking to learn jmeter correctly, this book will help you.